Having secured tickets to the Friday Daft Punk show months ago, I wouldn’t have thought it was possible to be any more excited about the weekend of the 14th of December, until I spotted DJ Falcon in the ‘Whats On’ section of ITM for the following night. I saw him at Future Music Festival earlier this year, and he was one of the highlights of the day so I was very much looking forward to seeing him again.

A part of the ‘Daft Crew’, DJ Falcon has been behind some of the biggest house tracks of the last decade. So Much Love to Give and Together (with Thomas Bangalter) still elicit huge reactions from any crowd they’re dropped in front of. Still buzzing from the spectacle of the previous night, we headed into Valve with spirits and expectations pretty high.

Valve is a bit of an odd one. A new feature on the Melbourne club circuit, it seems unsure of what it wants to be. The décor looks like a funky little bar, with white walls, intimate seating and lots of cushions. But then there are little tributes to the club name here and there, like the pipes running around the bar and the fire hose reels on the floor (note to future visitors: these are no good to dance on!) which give the place a bit of a theme-y, cheesy feel. And the sweeping green laser upstairs would seem more at home at a rave than it does here. The place definitely has potential!

The crowd was friendly and up for it, and there was plenty of buzz about the events of the last two days. “Did you go on Thursday or Friday? GA or stalls? Did you hear they played at the after party?” The warm up DJs (my apologies for not knowing their names – I asked a dozen people and no one could tell me anything!) played a decent set. It was fairly commercial, with remixes of Coldplay’s Clocks, Bodyrox’s What Planet You On? and Chemical Brothers’ Salmon Dance all getting a workout.

DJ Falcon started at about 1am, opening with In Love With You by Alan Braxe and Romuald. The crowd went nuts, jumping around and singing along (if you thought it wasn’t possible to sing along to a song with no words, these guys had news for you). There was still plenty of excitement left over from the previous 48 hours, and Falcon knew exactly how to tap into it, without being tacky or obvious. I really hope someone got a photo of the DJ booth in the first ten or fifteen minutes of Falcon’s set – there were about seven guys crowded behind him, leaning in and trying to get a look at what he was doing. It was hilarious. The booth was crowded all night with people genuinely interested in learning from him, as well as hangers-on who wanted to be close the centre of attention.

After In Love With You we got ACDC’s Thunderstruck, which was a bit of an odd choice, but it worked. Soon it was time for what everyone knew was going to happen eventually: a bit of Daft Punk. From the second they heard the first strains of Technologic the crowd lost their collective shit. When Falcon worked in High Life I thought I was going to die of French house happiness. You have to admit, that would be a hell of a way to go! From there he played some obscure 90s sounding tech-influenced stuff I’d never heard of which sounded great. The crowd loved it too, and Falcon never lost their attention for a second.

Soon after he dropped one of the most impressive things I have seen in a set (that whole pyramid thing from the day before also ranks pretty highly). He brought Rolling and Scratching (another Daft Punk classic) in and out for about fifteen minutes. Working with a laptop and an effects pad, the way this man teased the track through others, letting us think it was over and then blindsiding us with it again was something special. I know there’s a lot of debate about whether or not Ableton constitutes ‘real’ DJing, but in my humble little opinion, the point of being a DJ is to make people dance and have a good time. You can educate them and take them on a journey, but if they’re not having fun you’re probably not doing your job. What Falcon did with Ableton was truly incredible. It was definitely not something he could have done with decks alone, and it sounded absolutely amazing.

When Rolling and Scratching faded out for the last time, he dropped in Blue Monday, followed by an instrumental of Green Velvet’s Shake and Pop with a Jackson 5-esque vocal (it may very well have been Jackson 5, I’m not too familiar with their back catalogue). His set covered all sorts of bases, throwing in tracks like Chemical Brothers’ Do It Again, and Missy Elliott’s Let Me Work It mixed with both The Knife and Jose Gonzales’s versions of Heartbeats. Too often when a DJ tries to be diverse or surprising they end up losing the crowd because what they’re doing is just too hard to follow. Falcon never lost us for a second. Even the most surprising tracks (a remix of LL Cool J’s Phenomenon would be one!) seemed like a natural progression. Towards the end of the set he dropped in crowd pleasers like Axwell’s mix of Promiscuous (without the vocals), and a beautiful mix of Two Months Off by Underworld.

The way Falcon closed his set is one of the most impressive things I have ever seen. While Around the World (another Daft Punk biggie, for the six people out there who aren’t aware of that) was playing, he dropped in the vocal from Justin Timberlake’s My Love when the latter song sings ‘I’ve been around the world’ exactly as the Daft Punk track did the same. It was spectacular. He closed with an incredible mix of his two biggest tracks, Together and So Much Love to Give. Even though both were inevitable, they still got a huge reaction from the crowd, the entire floor singing along to both. When he finished the dancefloor emptied pretty quickly. The last DJ put in a solid set for the fifteen minutes we heard, but we were exhausted and called it a night.

I honestly cannot praise DJ Falcon highly enough. This was one of those sets that reminds you why you like this music in the first place. Why you trudge through train-tracking locals and cheese vendors every week – because every now and then you get a gift like this. Falcon put in a solid two and a half hours, and every second was breathtaking. All the mixes were seamless, and he combined elements of all the tracks he played in unexpected but brilliant ways. He was technically flawless and exceptionally skilled, the track selection was a perfect balance of commercial and underground styles and he had the crowd in the palm of his hand the entire time. Although this set will probably be overshadowed by the other French house show in town that weekend, it was the best I’ve seen in a long, long time. Vive le Falcon!